Tuesday, October 9, 2012

First image with Ekos!

For the past few weeks, Ekos, KStars Astrophotography tool, went thought a lot of updates and testing. Today I was able to use Ekos to take my first astrophotography image of M33, the Triangulum Galaxy using QSI 583wsg CCD.

M33 - 5 minutes exposure

During the course of the night, and after setting up my Orion EON 120mm refractor, Loadstar autoguider, and Robofocus at the roof of my house, I began with using Ekos Autofocus tool to get the CCD focused, then used the autoguiding tool to keep the M 33 field of view centered during the 5 minute exposure run. This is a raw image with no filters and no dark or flat frames taken to perform post-processing and calibration. It was processed by GIMP by adjusting levels to bring out the contrast. Unfortunately, GIMP does not handle 16bit depth images as of now, which limits its capability in processing astrophotography images.

It is very exciting to finally use 100% based Linux software to perform astrophotography tasks. Ekos is still under heavy development, and is slated for release in the next KDE 4.10 release.